All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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One facet of market research (really, product marketing) is identifying the
target customers and how well the product serves their needs.

I suspect one part of the echo chamber problem you describe is that few people seem to be explicit about who the customer might be and what they need.
One facet of market research (really, product marketing) is identifying the
target customer and how well the product serves their needs.

Perl has several "customers" to consider. A non-exhaustive list might
include:

This is an excellent point and one I've been considering. In order to define the customer, we need to understand what we're trying to do. In other words, once we have a goal defined, we can better understand who are customers actually are and thus know who we need to potentially gather data from. My goal is this (and when we get a group together, perhaps this will change):

Allow Perl to reclaim its status as a respectable programming language for new projects.

If that goal is acceptable, then we can better understand our customers. If there's a lot of positive buzz around Perl ("hey, modern Perl is actually easy to read!"), then I expect that people learning new languages might come along for the ride, but I don't want my hunches to define things.

Thus, we need to figure out:

Who gets to choose the programming languages for projects?

What are they looking for?

What languages are they choosing and why?

Why didn't they choose Perl? (Many would be surprised if it turns out that our competition is actually Java/C# and not PHP/Python/Ruby, but how can we know?)

Where are they getting their information?

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg, but the "who" is probably the customer I'm after.